I see you already have 27 replies...but I'll throw in my two cents.
I didn't believe it was this bad until I was made to believe it. My kid with 1 year full time experience at a FAANG adjacent company and a 6 month internship prior to that, is simple unable to get ANY interviews at all. And he is genuinely good at software development, much better than I was at his age.
I was skeptical, I thought his approach was wrong, I thought this and that. He let me take over his job looking process for a week. I submitted over 100 applications for positions local and remote - positions that he is qualified to do. Not a single interview. Not even a phone screen.
Compare this with when I left college. Interviews were available at the drop of a hat.
That doesn’t seem to be particularly unusual at the start of a career. When did you leave college? When I graduated 22 years ago, basically no one in my (Ivy League) class had a job lined up, and a lot of us didn’t find one until a year later.
My anecdotal experience is very different. It's possible that you graduated just after the dotcom bust. Couple of years later and it was very easy for a new grad to get an offer without that much effort.
I know at least that it was back to that from 2008 - 2010, because I was involved in hiring then. The small company I was working for got swamped with new graduates. We ended up hiring more than we planned to, because they would work for so little.
I think generally, historically, being able to get a high-paying job right out of college with no effort is an anomaly that people just got used to treating as normal due to the periods of free money and fast growth because of the new and growing Internet, and free money. They’re gone now, and with the way things are, they’re unlikely to come back.